Firebird Documentation IndexFirebird 2.0.6 Release Notes → General Notes
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General Notes

Table of Contents

Sub-release 2.0.6
Sub-release 2.0.5
Sub-release 2.0.4
Sub-release 2.0.3
Sub-release 2.0.2
Sub-release 2.0.1
Before You Proceed
Back Up!
Compatibility Issues
Incomplete Implementations
Bug Reporting and Support
Documentation

The v.2.0 release cycle of Firebird brought a large collection of long-awaited enhancements under the hood that significantly improved performance, security and support for international languages. Several annoying limitations, along with a huge pile of old bugs inherited from the legacy code, have gone. Many of the command-line tools have been refurbished and this release introduces the all-new incremental backup tools NBak and NBackup.

The old “252 bytes or less” limit on index size is gone for good, replaced by much-extended limits that depend on page size. Calculation of index statistics has been revamped to improve the choices the optimizer has available, especially for complex outer join distributions and DISTINCT queries.

Many new additions have been made to the SQL language, including support for derived tables (SELECT ... FROM ( SELECT ... FROM), PSQL blocks in dynamic SQL through the new EXECUTE BLOCK syntax and some handy new extensions in PSQL itself.

Sub-release 2.0.6

This sub-release does not add any new functionality to the database engine. Several important bug-fixes that have turned up during development of versions 2.1.x and 2.5 have been backported.

Of special note are the fixes for the gfix validation and shutdown issues described below in the Known Issues for V.2.0.5. The Tracker ticket numbers are CORE-2271 and CORE-2846, respectively.

Note also few backported improvements that are present in this release:

  • The firebird.conf ConnectionTimeout can now be applied to XNET connections, to help with a specific slow connection problem on some Windows installations.

  • A backported optimizer improvement could help to speed up some complicated queries involving cross joins.

  • A backported nBackup improvement for POSIX platforms could help alleviate a reported problem of resource-gobbling during full backup.

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